Ref. No. 99

Students from Memorial University's Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science came home from the Atlantic Engineering Competition (AEC) in Moncton, New Brunswick with a gold medal in senior impromptu design and a silver medal in entrepreneurial design. This annual competition, open to universities in Atlantic Canada, gives engineering students an opportunity to express their talents, and develop and evaluate their problem solving, communication and design capabilities. The competition was held Feb. 8-10. "It is great to see students taking the initiative and going to compete in such an important event, " said Dr. R Seshadri, dean of Memorial's Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science. "It has been three years since Memorial has been represented at the Atlantic Engineering Competition and the fact that they competed, without the advantage of previous experience, and succeeded, is certainly a testament to the quality of our students."

The gold-winning competition consisted of designing and building a device that could project a snowball fifty feet and hit a target. The closer to the target the more points were awarded to each team. Term six students Brad Coady, Rocky Taylor, James Legge and Mike Buckle, were given a garbage bag of parts and ten hours to create something that could achieve the given objective. The other team, term eight students Steve Taylor, Mark Gillingham, Mark Simms and Colin Power, took home the silver medal for their entrepreneurial design, which they call Distributed Embedded Modular Architecture (DEMA). This system is used with autonomous underwater vehicles. Instead of one computer controlling everything, all the tasks are distributed out to separate parts of the vehicle. This design strategy helps to ensure that when one piece of the system fails, it does not take down the entire system.

The chance to compete at such a competition was a reward in itself, according to engineering student Brad Coady. "The people you meet at these conferences and competitions are the leading go-getters, the most ambitious, the smartest, from engineering schools in Atlantic Canada," Mr. Coady said. "They are the ones who will be the leading engineers of tomorrow." The two winning teams will proceed to the Canadian Engineering Competition to be held in Quebec City from March 7-10, 2002.

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For further information, please contact Tracey Mills, information officer, Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science, Memorial University of Newfoundland at (709) 737-8287 or by e-mail at tmills@engr.mun.ca.